Ex-D&B employee accused of threats

Police: He made "kaboom' bomb calls to Martin Tower.

October 08, 2004|By Manuel Gamiz Jr. Of The Morning Call

Several times in the last week, someone left early morning voice-mail messages for employees at the former Dun & Bradstreet office in Bethlehem's Martin Tower saying that a bomb would go off in the company's kitchen.

The caller, using what police described as a phony foreign accent, ended some messages with "kaboom," followed by some chuckling and mumbling.

Three times in six days, the company ordered its employees to leave the Lehigh Valley's tallest building.

Using the phone records from D&B, the business-information provider formerly known as Dun & Bradstreet, police traced the calls to pay phones in Fountain Hill, south Bethlehem and Hanover Township, Northampton County.

Investigators then viewed a surveillance tape at one of the pay phones and came up with a suspect -- a former D&B employee who worked for the company more than a decade.

Bethlehem police asked the suspect, Robert Mikielski of Berks County, to come to headquarters for an interview and he arrived Wednesday night with a toothbrush, toothpaste and other toiletries, almost as if he knew he had been caught, said one city detective.

On Thursday, police charged Mikielski, 53, of 53 Wilson Road, Kempton, with making threats to use weapons of mass destruction, risking catastrophe, making terroristic threats and making false alarms to agencies of public safety. He was sent to Lehigh County Prison by District Justice Joan Snyder, who set bail at $1 million.

Mikielski, who is unemployed, told police he was still angry with the company after his supervisor "came to his desk and told him he had one hour to gather his belongings and clear the premises" in 1999, according to court records.

The company told police the threats cost it hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The first bomb scare was reported at 8:43 a.m. Sept. 28. About 1,800 people were evacuated from D&B and Martin Tower for four hours while a bomb-sniffing dog and members of the city bomb squad searched the building. Nothing was found, but police later learned that the call came from a pay phone at a convenience store in south Bethlehem, police said.

Emergency crews were called back to Martin Tower on Saturday after an employee with Hoover's Inc., a business-information company also in Martin Tower, received three threatening messages.

Again the building was evacuated, emergency crews searched it and again found nothing.

An employee coming to work Monday discovered a voice-mail message stating that a bomb was going to go off at 1:30 p.m. Monday. The call was made from a pay phone in south Bethlehem on Saturday morning, police said.

Police viewed a surveillance tape from the location of one of the Saturday morning calls and determined the man on the tape was the only person using the pay phone at that time.

Bethlehem investigators showed the tape to D&B senior employees, and one of them recognized him as Mikielski, a former employee.

Police said Mikielski told them he was still angry at the way he was laid off and someone else is now doing his job. He said during Musikfest in August, he spoke to some D&B employees who told him layoffs were still happening.

Yvette Rudich, leader of external communications for D&B, said the company has no comment about Mikielski's employment or the bomb threats.

D&B, a 162-year-old company that provides corporate credit information and other financial data to business clients, is based in Short Hills, N.J., and employs about 1,000 people in Lehigh and Northampton counties, most of them in the Martin Tower complex.

D&B Receivables Management Services was sold in 2001 and is now a private company based in Bethlehem that provides debt collection and related services. It employs about 1,000 people in Martin Tower.